


The Care and Feeding of Unruly Capes

by Tamoline



Series: The Life and Loves of a Cape Wrangler [1]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 14:00:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17225369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamoline/pseuds/Tamoline
Summary: Being the finance girl, PR guru and general manager of a team of capes should be a full time job. Madison really isn't paid enough for this, but she wouldn't change things for the world.





	The Care and Feeding of Unruly Capes

**Author's Note:**

> This is an omake for [The Case of the Disappeared Villain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17006943/chapters/39982677) by [StabbyUnicorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stabbyunicorn/pseuds/stabbyunicorn), and is also a prequel for The Dating Habits of Useless Lesbians.

_Potato Puppy: When r we gonna c the pics from the latest fight???_  
_Envitaloppen: Yeah when do they drop_  
 _Marwig16: Can’t wait to see Stormtiger get taken down_  
  
It was a sad fact, Madison reflected as she wandered down the street, that the most reliable way to find out whether members of her own team had gotten into a fight was to watch the team twitter feed. Lord knew that neither Sophia nor Taylor would bother to tell her. And she was a member of the team, despite the fact that she didn’t fight or have powers or a fancy costume. Well, if you didn’t count cosplay, which neither of the other two did.  
  
She stopped and frowned as she reached the entrance to the Agora, before getting her keys out and scratching at a sticker on the wall with them. Stickers bearing the cartouche of Serqet or Kauket were one thing — Little Egypt, as it had become known over the last couple of years, was littered with them these days — but this was fairly obviously one of those unauthorised reproductions that had been cropping up.  
  
And that just offended her on a fundamental level.  
  
It wasn’t even as if they looked nearly as good as the ones that Madison had paid an internet artist good money to draw. They were just some crappy MS Paint thing that someone had spent five minutes slapping together and then had apparently printed out by the dozens.  
  
Not that Taylor, the most able to investigate of their group, showed any interest in this dilution of their IP, not to mention the loss of their revenue. No, there was always something more important to be doing, even though it would clearly be no extra effort to keep an eye out for someone sticking these up at the same time.  
  
Seriously, she did not know what those girls would do without her.  
  
Mission accomplished, she bopped into the Agora, to be encompassed by the familiar sights and sounds. It honestly now seemed a little weird pretty much never seeing a single hijab, niqab or bindi spot, turban or kippah elsewhere in Brockton Bay. And the conformity of clothing and gender expressions elsewhere was just boring these days.  
  
No matter what else, they’d done this much between them, created a place where people could be unafraid to just be themselves, without having to pay the exorbitant prices of the upper class parts of town to get the full protection of the law.  
  
Not to mention the smells… which reminded her. Part the umpteenth in her effort to expand the dietary tastes of her housemates. She made her way over to Mrs Pashazadeh’s stall.  
  
“Hi!” she said enthusiastically. “What have you got for me today?”  
  
Mrs Pashazadeh smiled down at her — it was seriously unfair how tall everyone else was — and said, “How did you attempt at bademjan go?”  
  
Madison wrinkled her nose and waved her hand in the air. “Still getting there. Have you any other recipes for me to try?”  
  
“I’ve just got some nicely young and tender fava beans here. Let’s try and get you started on baghali polo, see if that works for you.”  
  
Madison took notes on her phone, going over the names in her mind to try and make sure that she remembered them correctly, and handed over the cash. “Thanks! I’ll let you know how it goes.”  
  
Then it was just getting the rest of the groceries — tea for Taylor, coffee for Sophia and her, toilet rolls for them all and she was fairly sure that they were running low on toothpaste. Sure she could probably get most or all of these items at a supermarket, cheaper even, but she liked to try and support the community that had grown there when she could.  
  
Then it was back off home, just under a block away. She jogged up the stairs and unlocked the door. She wasn’t surprised to see the common area, lit by a skylight, empty, with no sounds coming from any of the partitioned areas. She shrugged — she’d have to wait until later to find out how the day’s events had gone — and put the supplies away in the kitchen area, pausing only briefly to narrow her eyes at the unwashed plates and utensils in the sink, still there since she’d left in the morning.  
  
Then it was off to get some coursework done. She waggled a finger at one of Taylor’s dummies, posed ominously behind the couch. “Stay,” she told it before plopping herself down. She wiggled around a bit as a spring dug into her back, but managed to find a position that wasn’t too uncomfortable.  
  
Flipping her laptop open, she first off tabbed to the online auction. The bidding was up to $52 for a genuine piece of Kauket memorabilia, a bolt halfway fused through a piece of metal. Ugh. The price on those was still drifting ever downwards, despite her attempts to keep the price inflated by controlling rarity. Apparently that epic fight where Kauket managed to badly injure Kaiser was already fading in people’s minds. She could try and make it a general item, available from their website, try and make up the difference in bulk… but firstly that would mean trying to convince Sophia to make more, but also — what if Kauket managed to get into another telegenic battle and she’d already devalued the merch?  
  
Decisions, decisions.  
  
Finally, it was over to the CapeFunder page just to check how their numbers were doing. Oh, good, they were up a little. Not so much in number, but a few people had bumped their tier up to Eyes Only, presumably hoping for a juicy bonus from the fight earlier.  
  
Well, that was good news at least.  
  
And finally, when she couldn’t really justify putting it off any longer, she focussed on her Economics 101 coursework. She made a face at the computer screen, but started typing. Ugh. It sucked that she didn’t have the time to make enough of a support group to get help with this kind of thing, but such were the sacrifices she made for this time.  
  
And, in all honesty, she wouldn’t give it up for the world. She certainly hadn’t given it up for the promise of a place at a decent university out of state, despite having aimed the first half of her high school career at accomplishing exactly that.  
  
A message appeared at the top of the screen, informing her of an email from Parian to her work account. Opening it up, it was a request from Parian for any good pictures of her or her animals from the fight today, in return for the usual fee. She sent a quick email saying she’d get them back to her as quickly possible. The money offered wasn’t really worth the time Madison spent on it, but anything which encouraged backup for Sophia and Taylor was good by her. And, hey, there was always the chance that Parian would actually join the group if Madison kept on treating her like she was a quasi-member, instead of just being generally based in the same area, doing the same kind of things.  
  
She was in the middle of puzzling over some math problems when an inhumanly slender form lurched over her. She shrieked and fell off the couch… to the sound of some very familiar laughter. She twisted around to see Sophia propping up Taylor’s damned dummy, corpsing.  
  
“I… can’t… believe… you fell… for that… again,” she gasped in between snorts of laughter.  
  
Maddison, pulse still pounding in her chest, glared at her. Sadly, it only seemed to have the effect of making Sophia laugh louder. “That wasn’t funny the first time you pulled that ‘joke’,” she said, moving so she could nudge Sophia in the ribs. “Now it’s just getting old. And boring.”  
  
Sophia’s laughs subsided and she glowered at Madison, though her expression was somewhat spoiled by the glint of triumph still in her eyes.  
  
“How are you? How was the fight?” Madison asked.  
  
Sophia shrugged, gracefully rolling to her feet and towering over Madison even more than usual. “Fine. And, yeah, good. We got word that there was a meth shipment coming in. There was” —she gave a fierce grin— “and apparently the Empire decided to try and make it a trap. Didn’t work out so well for them.”  
  
“And Stormtiger?” Madison got to her feet as well.  
  
“Going to be feeling what we did to him for a while. Blitz too, for that matter. It was kind of epic.” Sophia looked a little nostalgic.  
  
There was no way that Sophia would use the word epic for a fight against only two capes, especially not if they had Parian on their side as well. “Who else was there?” she asked, her stomach twisting nervously.  
  
“Stormtiger, Blitz, Donner, Rune and BlindSight. Nothing we couldn’t handle.”  
  
“And has Sophia mentioned how she found out about this shipment?” Taylor’s voice asked tightly from the direction of the doorway. As she moved into the apartment, Madison couldn’t help but notice that she moved slightly stiffly, and Madison’s stomach twisted again. Not that Taylor would even think of allowing her to approach right at the moment.  
  
Sophia rolled her eyes epically. “Just because I keep my hand in with contacts.”  
  
“Contacts,” Taylor said flatly.  
  
Oh great. This totally wasn’t a conversation they’d had before. Not like either of them would listen to her about this, though, unless it served their point. Which wouldn’t calm things down in the slightest.  
  
She tried anyway. “Maybe we should talk about this later. Dinner-”  
  
“There are some people we don’t-” Taylor cut off mid sentence, and gazed off into the distance. “There’s trouble at the shelter. Looks like an ex has showed up.” Moments later, Madison’s phone buzzed with a text from Jane, the woman who ran the place in question.  
  
Madison took this for the blessing it was and glared at Sophia until she pulled her snake’s head hood back up and said, “I’m up for taking care of that one.” She cricked her neck. “Guess this one’s just lucky I managed to work out some of my aggression today already.” She turned misty and faded out through a wall.  
  
Madison looked around to find that Taylor had already disappeared. Sighing, she grabbed the first-aid kit from the cupboard and the cold pads from the freezer. As she approached Taylor’s partition, a wall of flying insects formed up in front of her, buzzing angrily. Mostly flies, Madison was glad to note.  
  
“Really?” she asked. No change. “You’re going to keep me out of a partition I built in the first place?” she asked, going for levity. Well, arranged to be built, by some cousins of her former soccer coach, anyway. Still no change. “Okay,” she said, “If you don’t let me in, I’ll… lay these down here, and hope you take care of yourself. But it’ll be a lot easier if you let me do it.”  
  
For a moment, she thought she was going to have to do just that, but then the wall of insects evaporated as though it had never been.  
  
Taylor was lying on her bed staring up at the ceiling, not visibly acknowledging Madison’s presence in the slightest. Madison was relieved to see that her costume was intact at least, though hopefully even Sophia would have made her get help if that had been the case.  
  
“Where does it hurt?” she asked.  
  
Expression unchanging, Taylor moved her hand to indicate her left bicep, left side, right calf.  
  
“Do you want to get changed first, or so you want me to just get access as best I can?”  
  
Taylor remained motionless, and Madison took that as her answer. Taylor’s costume might have armoured her well, but it didn’t exactly make getting to any injuries easy. She ended up having to tug the top off, to reveal angry red swellings on Taylor’s arm and side that were already darkening. It didn’t look like there was any internal bleeding, though she’d check them again tomorrow, just to make sure. She tsked, wrapped them up in compression bandages and applied cold patches, then did the same for her leg injury.  
  
And all the while, she worried. Taylor never liked being treated, hated being anything close to vulnerable in front of Madison or especially Sophia. But she hadn’t been this non-verbal in quite a while. It reminded Madison of the bad times, when they’d first tentatively started working together, when Madison had been more than half convinced that this team, forged under the pressure of a school assignment gone wrong, would end as quickly as it had started.  
  
What had happened today? Had whoever Sophia been talking to been that bad?  
  
Whatever it was, Madison would have to deal with it. Because lord knew, neither of the other two would.  
  
In the meantime, she would do her best to break the tension, at least a little, on this end. “So, I counted another ten Serqet cartouches on the way home, to only two new Kauket,” she attempted. “Going to use that to piss Sophia off when she gets back?” Nothing. “Because if you don’t, I might,” she continued. “She scared the hell out of me with your dummy again.” She purposefully let a whine enter her voice. Nothing. Okay, tough crowd. “Given you see all and hear all, the least you could do is give me some warning.”  
  
The corner of Taylor’s mouth twitched. “Maybe I don’t want to,” she whispered.  
  
Madison clutched her chest dramatically. “Betrayed, by my own patient. Oh, speaking of Sophia, the latest auction on her merch looks like it’s going to fetch less money.” Money seemed a lot more urgent now, with the reminder that a costly hospital visit was just one bad fight away. But she tried for humour anyway, “Maybe you’ll have to start contributing more to the fund,” she said, teasingly.  
  
It worked. Thank god it worked as Taylor’s cheeks went scarlet and she focussed on Madison — granted, in horror — for the first time since she’d returned. “No,” she said warningly, seemingly all of a sudden aware of her state of dishabille as she clutched Serqet’s top to her torso. “No,” she repeated.  
  
“Look, all I’m saying is that I know we could pull in the big bucks if you agreed to make spider-spun custom lingerie.”  
  
“Madison!” Taylor groaned, grabbing a pillow with her other hand, and throwing it with pinpoint accuracy at Madison’s head,  
  
“Okay, okay,” Madison said, giggling a little as she backed away, before sobering. “Do you feel up to helping me with dinner? I’m going to try out a new recipe.”  
  
The red slowly fading from her cheeks, Taylor contemplated for a second, before slowly nodding. “I’ll be out in a bit,” she said.  
  
Madison waved goodbye before exiting the partition, drawing the curtain shut behind her. “Thanks,” she said, then added more loudly, just in case Sophia was in ear shot. “It’s not like anyone else is pulling their weight around here.”  
  
She heard a quiet laugh from behind her as Sophia yelled, “Okay, okay. I’ll wash the damn plates up. Message received.”  
  
And Madison started to believe that, just for tonight, things might approximate normal. At least until the next crisis hit.


End file.
